Question about video formats

[tgc225]

I know well enough about picture formats and how to make them lossless, and same thing with audio, you have an Audio CD with uncompressed WAV files that you can rip and compress to lossless codecs.

But how is lossless progressing on videos? I assume that there are a lot of other things to consider such as frames per second and resolution.

Anyway, I was thinking of getting a TV Tuner in a few weeks. And I was also hoping to record some shows. Is there a standard resolution that cable TV comes in that will be used when making the video file? And is there a way to capture that file in a raw uncompressed format and then convert it to a lossless video format and FLAC audio for example? Basically, I'd like to have a copy of the video in the exact quality and resolution it was broadcast in.

Is it even practical to do it like this? I know that if I want to watch it on my DVD player, I'll have to convert to MPEG2, and that's a lossy format, correct? How much of a difference is there in quality?

Thanks, and sorry for the really newbie quesitons

[andkiich]

Do a forum search on your topic, that has been covered before.

[indolikaa]

But how is lossless progressing on videos?

It's not. The whole purpose of the Motion Picture Experts Group was to deal with this very issue. Uncompressed .avi files run about 60 GB per hour.

Is there a standard resolution that cable TV comes in that will be used when making the video file?

Well, traditional analog cable is 336x480. Digital cable is at the mercy of whatever front-end encoding scheme is being utilized.

And is there a way to capture that file in a raw uncompressed format and then convert it to a lossless video format and FLAC audio for example?

You could capture with huffyuv. That would get you down to about 25 GB per hour.

Is it even practical to do it like this?

No. That's why MPEG was developed.

How much of a difference is there in quality?

Try this: 704x480 @ 8000 CBR (1I1P1B encoding) with LPCM audio. You won't get much on a DVD but this puts your overall bitrate at 9.5 Mb/s. Compare it to the uncompressed.avi file it was created from.

[tgc225]

Thanks a lot for your in-depth post! So I guess lossless video won't be popular for a while at 25gb an hour

Anyway, is that "704x480 @ 8000 CBR (1I1P1B encoding)" for the MPEG2 format? Is that the recommended format for highest quality?

By the way, is there any website that goes over every popular digital video format?

[indolikaa]

You're welcome.

The best information on digital video I ever found was at lordsmurf.com. Not an in-depth analysis, but enough to understand why TMPGEnc has the settings it has. I've also learned a lot from this forum, but I do troll twice a day and read a lot of posts.

The 60 and 25 GB figures are estimates, I could be off on those a little. It's been awhile since I've captured uncompressed .avi files.

[tgc225]

Thanks again! I'll check out that site.